It is an exciting time to be an igneous petrologist. Many traditional ideas about the evolution of the mantle, melt generation and magma differentiation that you might teach in a BSc level course, are being revised by ongoing research. I'm interested in how ancient and recycled components in the mantle have formed and how they contribute to volcanism at ocean islands and large igneous provinces. I'm also curious about how deeper-derived melts evolve in the crust, and how the petrological dynamics in these so called magma reservoirs influence different eruptions types.
Volatiles and their stable isotopes in volcanic materials are recurring themes of my research. Because of their special type of behavior in geological environments, volatiles can be used to extract unique information about the mantle and magmatic processes that is unaccessible for other classes of elements. My research targets specific isotope systems such as sulfur, boron, oxygen and hydrogen in order to understand how and why the Icelandic mantle is heterogeneous. In the special case of Kverkfjöll, I look at all of these isotopes in a single volcanic system.
It all boils down to fluids.
I'm unrecoverably interested in the interface between the magmatic and hydrothermal interface. I believe a lot of magic happens, and many answers live in this realm. Magmatic fluids, as they exist near an intrusive body, are very hard to catch. I have studied chlorine isotopes in rhyolites, fluid-rock reactions in ferrocarbonatites and magmatic gases in hydrothermal fluids. I am irredeemably excited about finding magmatic fluids in high-temperature fluid inclusions. I also work on eruptive sulfur outgassing of past and recent eruptions.
What are volatile elements?
In a cosmochemistry, elements are classified as refractory or volatile. Refractory elements (for example Al, Mg, Ti, Ca, Fe, Ni, REEs) have high condensation temperatures and are the first to precipitate out of the cooling (pre-)solar nebula as oxide or silicate minerals or metallic alloys. Volatile elements (for example H, He, C, Na, S, Cl, K, Hg, Pb) are those with low condensation temperatures, that is, elements that remain gaseous above temperatures of c. 1300 K at low pressures. However, this classification is neither intuitive or practical when considering the geochemical behaviour of elements in magmatic environments on Earth. For example, K and Na that are volatile in a cosmochemical sense, are usually rock-forming elements on Earth. For this reason, igneous geochemists classify volatile elements and compounds as those that partition strongly to fluid phases during magmatic processes and tend to be liquids or gases at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. Whenever I talk casually about volatiles, it is in this latter sense.